Insidious Puppy is a Puppy built from Debian Sid packages (in the same way Lucid Puppy is built from Ubuntu packages) that lays more emphasis on stability, long-term usability and out-of-the-box experience. Its key features are high Debian and Lucid Puppy compatibility, a good selection of applications (through Debian's repositories), an excellent multimedia stack and good hardware support.

Under-the-hood, it’s Puppy in all its glory. It is more conservative and traditional than Lucid Puppy, yet not “retro”. It works pretty much like Puppy in the 4.x days - it doesn’t boot straight to the desktop (for better compatibility with exotic video hardware), has a full-blown browser and has its own package repository in PPM.

Its development is more “upstream” than Lucid Puppy's and follows the recent development in Woof closely. It consist of around 90% Debian package, in contrast with other Woof-built puppies. Just for comparison - Lucid Puppy 5.1 consists of around 65% Ubuntu packages. This means its development is more future-proof.

The development is open to suggestions and complaints. Don't be shy.

If you have any useful PET packages, let me know - I can upload them to the repo.

Credit for the name goes to pemas and the credit for the logo goes to its original creator; I just modified it.

What's special about it?

Insidious Puppy’s packages provide a good compromise between cutting-edge technologies and rock-solid stability. They aren't the newest, but in general, they're quite recent: some packages are the latest, but most packages are lagging one or two versions behind and enjoy many fixes and improvements introduced by the Debian guys. Insidious Puppy provides a great balance between old and new; it consists of fairly recent, stable Debian packages and a slightly older kernel.

Insidious Puppy is not targeted at a specific target audience or hardware. Instead, it is a “generic” Puppy. It has all the applications you need for day-to-day work, including a web browser, an e-mail client, a word processor, a spreadsheet application, a media player and so on.

Insidious Puppy is powered by the long-term-support Linux kernel 2.6.32.26, for better stability. It is fine-tuned for performance and good hardware compatibility. This makes it an ideal "second chance Puppy" for those who don't like more cutting-edge puppies or newer kernels, as used in Lucid Puppy or Quirky.

Insidious Puppy features the Iceape (a rebranded Seamonkey) internet suite, which consists of a web browser, an e-mail client and an address book. It was used to be known as the de-facto browser for Puppy for its wide compatibility, stability and efficiency compared to a set of three independent applications with similar functionality.

Also, Insidious Puppy is armed with MPlayer and GNOME-MPlayer, Guvcview, Alsaplayer, Asunder, Sweep and other applications to provide a great multimedia experience. It even has Xorg_High (which is quite big) built-in, which means it doesn't waste space in the save file and enables 3D capabilities out-of-the-box.

Additionally, Insidious Puppy has GNU Paint, mtPaint, fotoxx and gtkam on its graphics front, to make the user's work with graphics more pleasant. These applications allow easy management of digital cameras, overview of photo albums and graphics editing.

Moreover, Insidious Puppy has heaps of other useful applications, such as Simple Scan, Transmission, xchat, gcalctool, gToDo, xpad, Leafpad, xbindkeys, gFTP and much more. Many traditional Puppy applications are replaced with (better, matter of opinion) alternatives.

Also, Insidious Puppy has a good icon set, a beautiful wallpaper (from KDE) and a good selection of elegant GTK themes (from Xfce). It contains a basic pack of fonts to make web browsing and office work more easy on the eyes, compatible with other Linux distributions and aesthetically pleasing. It supports right-to-left and exotic languages (because it has Debian's fonts) and has locales for end-user applications.

Insidious Puppy has even more cool stuff, like a working "printscreen" key, suspend-to-RAM with Fn+Zz, Parcellite, ppower, wcpufreq ... the list is too long to mention. Just grab your copy to see them

What release cycle does it have?

The simple answer is: "release when ready". That's what the Debian guys and many puplet developers do. This works very well if you examine the quality of the products they produce.

I'm going to the army soon, so I won't have much time to work on it. However, it's very easy to develop Insidious (making it that way took a very long time, that's why it's been so long since Puppy Squeeze 009) so maybe I'll do some "snapshot" releases with improvements and fixes. I want it to be sort of a "LTS" Puppy.

I intend to write a full guide for building Insidious Puppy (including the kernel and setting up an unofficial PPM repository), for those who don't like the size, which comes from Xorg_High, Iceape and the modem drivers. This could be a good source of inspiration for puplet developers who want to give their puplets features that make the difference between a customized Puppy version and a full-featured Puppy release in its own right.

Oh, and one last thing - I had a plan to build "trinitypup" - an experiment to build a Puppy with Trinity (a KDE 3.x fork) in Woof. The reason I didn't do this with Puppy Squeeze was the ratio of PET packages used to build it. Now, I can finally do this experiment ... KDE 3.x lovers, stay tuned

Should I use it? Is it compatible with my hardware?

This is a very subjective question.

If you don't like Lucid Puppy, Quirky and any other 5.x-generation puppies, this one might be interesting. Also, if you're the adventurous type, this one is crafted especially for you.

Insidious Puppy is compatible with pretty much any x86 processor (like any other Puppy) and the minimum supported is Pentium II. It should support pretty much the same hardware as 5.x-generation puppies and even more, because its kernel has a broader variety of drivers. It supports the rfkill switch, Hyperthreading, power saving for sound cards, GPIO, CPU frequency scaling and more things that are unsupported on most other puppies. It even has acpi_call (which is useful for machines with multiple GPUs), some modem drivers and ndiswrapper.

Generally, it's faster than most comparable puppies, due to the kernel and the i686-optimized stuff it has, but only as long as you have enough RAM. Due to its bigger size, Insidious Puppy might run slower on machines with very low amounts of RAM (128 MB or less), but if you install it to a hard drive partition in a full installation, it should feel snappier than other puppies on such machines.

Download

Insidious Puppy 001, released November 28, built with the November 28 Woof (the one used with Luci 240 and Quirky 1.4, with the zzz PET) -
ISO: inpu-001.iso
devx: inpu_devx_001.sfs
MD5 sums: md5sums.txt

Once you install it, go to PPM, click "Configure package manager" and update the package lists in order to be able to install packages. Nvidia drivers, Flash, Skype and Pidgin should be available in PPM once you do so.

The kernel sources and the sources for the stuff in the repo are available here. The kernel sources also include the kernel configuration, patches and third-party extras. The patches were generated by me (with the exception of the BFS patch) and I worked really hard to make the knowledge needed to build Insidious free and open._________________My homepageMy GitHub profileLast edited by Iguleder on Fri 03 Dec 2010, 13:27; edited 6 times in total

Thanks for your patience with my derailing. I've downloaded it and hope it allow me to connect to the internet I report back within some 30 minutes I hope._________________I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

Is this an update to the one of the same name that I downloaded and tested a couple of days ago?

I am downloading ... I just changed the name to insu_001a.iso so as to not overwrite the one already in the insidiouspup download folder!_________________Thanks! DavidHome page: http://nevils-station.comDon't googleSearch!http://duckduckgo.com
TahrPup64 & Lighthouse64-b602 & JL64-603Last edited by edoc on Sun 28 Nov 2010, 15:29; edited 1 time in total

Some of the puppies give preference for the smaller of two screens when both are connected.

which makes the lower part not available when one do F11 which is a bad thing compared to Fluppy or Puppeee that allow the bigger screen to use F11 all over that screen.
Can one change this behavior somewhere in some setting?

apart from this I kind of like it. Good you told us about your efforts_________________I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

Edoc I guess they gave a very good advice it all depends on the lines one use. We have very good lines with no noise on them and you maybe have a lot of spikes and such so wget or similar might be a good thing._________________I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

It's a new ISO; the deltas from the previous one are around 55-60 MB. Big difference

The muted sound problem should be gone and all the fixes that went into the latest Woof are there too. Sorry for the confusion, I had no version number to give the "beta" except "001", because that's the minimum _________________My homepageMy GitHub profile

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